Maxime de la Rocheterie on Marie-Antoinette

"She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr."

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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Sunday, February 14, 2016

First abortion...and now women in combat. One barbarism leads to another. Women of America need to rise up in outrage. Not only are so many women deprived of motherhood by abortion, but now we are literally being sent into hand-to-hand combat. Any civilizations that puts its mothers in the front lines is doomed. From The National Review:

...Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio each embraced the idea
that women should register with the selective service, making it
possible for America to draft women into ground combat. The argument for
registration is based on the new Pentagon policy opening up all combat
jobs to women. Women have served in non-combat roles for decades without
any serious push for selective-service registration ensuing. In fact,
the Supreme Court, in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), has used the fact that
men and women have different roles as justification for rejecting
constitutional objections to the all-male draft.

We have repeatedly condemned the Obama administration’s decision to
open all combat roles to women, and we have mainly done so by citing a
combination of contemporary studies and historical experience to make
the case that gender-integrated ground-combat units are less effective
than their all-male counterparts.
But that is not the only argument. Indeed, there are other fundamental
reasons to oppose not just the presence of women in the infantry but
their forcible conscription into its ranks. Such a policy inverts
natural law and the rules that have grounded our civilization for
thousands of years.

Men should protect women. They should not shelter behind mothers
and daughters. Indeed, we see this reality every time there is a mass
shooting. Boyfriends throw themselves over girlfriends, and even
strangers and acquaintances often give themselves up to save the woman
closest to them. Who can forget the story of 45-year-old Shannon Johnson
wrapping his arms around 27-year-old Denise Peraza and declaring “I got
you” before falling to the San Bernardino shooters’ bullets?
Ground combat is barbaric. Even today, men grapple with men, killing
each other with anything they can find. Returning veterans describe
countless incidents of hand-to-hand combat with jihadists. In his book
about the Battle of Ganjgal, Into the Fire, Medal of Honor recipient
Dakota Meyer describes just such an encounter with a Taliban fighter.
The Taliban tried to capture Meyer, and they ended up wrestling in the
dirt. (Read more.)

When critics attempt to justify the Pentagon’s decision to open all
combat jobs to women — or drafting women into those roles — by
referring to the Israel Defense Forces, they’re betraying considerable
ignorance. Israel’s history with women in combat is vastly overblown,
its present policy is more restrictive than the Pentagon’s, and it’s in a
fundamentally different strategic situation than the United States. To
the extent there’s a valid comparison with the United States, Israel’s
history should stand as a cautionary tale for American policy-makers.

It is true that women fought as part of the Haganah, the Jewish
militia that defended Jewish settlements during the struggle for
survival prior to and following World War II. But, as outlined in a
comprehensive paper for the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort
Leavenworth, this policy — born of desperate necessity as Jewish
citizens defended their homes and villages from genocidal assaults —
also showed the limits of gender-integrated units. Mixed-gender units
had higher casualty rates, and Haganah commanders stopped using women in
assault forces because “physically girls could not run as well — and if
they couldn’t run fast enough, they could endanger the whole unit, so
they were put in other units.”
Indeed, when the IDF was formally established, women were soon put into
an “Auxiliary Corps.” When the IDF engaged trained Arab armies in some
of the most vicious conventional combat engagements in the modern era,
it did so with all-male combat units. As reported in the Leavenworth
paper, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion justified the changes
with a statement of sheer common sense:

There is a fundamental difference between the Haganah and the IDF.
Until November 1947, the Haganah was for local defense. There was a need
to defend the place of settlement and the call to defense included
everybody who was capable. But an army is a totally different thing. In
war, an army’s main task is to destroy the enemy army — not just defend.
When we protected the home with rifle in hand, there was no difference
between boy and girl. Both could take shelter, and everything he knew —
she knew. But in an army and in war, there is a reality of inequality in
nature, and impossible to send girls to fighting units. Yet an army
also needs non-combat units. And women are needed for appropriate
professions to strengthen the nation’s fighting force by releasing men
from those tasks for combat.

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